"The Most Beautifiul Pool in Florida"

In 1940, as America teetered on the brink of a catclysmic World War, several luxurious Art Deco hotels were placed on Miami Beach's Collins Avenue like a string of gleaming pearls on a necklace. One of the most luminescent of these architectural gems was The Raleigh Hotel, designed by L. Murray Dixon.

The hotel's most magnificent features are the intimate Martini Bar and a spectacular swiming pool.

I first photographed the famous Raleigh pool around 1993 for the now defunct South Florida Magazine:
This photograph from that shoot later appeared in many magazines around the world, as well as in my book South Beach, America's Riviera, and in the Miami Design Preservation League's Miami Beach Architectural Guide

In 2002, one of the most astute hoteliers of our day, André Balazs, bought the hotel from a South Beach revival pioneer, Kenny Zarrilli, who had made The Raleigh emblematic of the Miami Beach renaissance, filling it with fashion shoots and hipsters in the 1990s. Ten years later Balazs polished Zarrilli's somewhat funky Raleigh into something even more chic.

Recently, one of The Raleigh's sales executives came across my 1993 picture in Switzerland, and asked me to update my photograph to show the pool and pool area as it looks today. So last week I rephotographed the pool for about an hour from the wrap-around balcony of The Raleigh's penthouse -- a rather spectacular perch.


In the 1940s Life magazine hailed The Raleigh's pool as "the most beautiful in Florida." Some say it still is.

When I processed my raw files from this shoot in Adobe's Photoshop CS3, I interpreted the colors to be a little warmer than they actually seemed to the camera at mid-day (the camera made everything too blue). Then I opened up the shadows quite a bit and burned in some highlights. Next I worked to make my colors reminiscent of those I see in vintage postcards. I also converted some of my images into black-and-whites, and then into duotones: a little blue in the shadows plus a little rose in the highlights, and then a little platinum gray everywhere.


In the era of chemical-based photography, I would have made many of these adjustments mechanically in the old-fashioned, wet darkroom, by manipulating with my hands the amount of light falling from the enlarger onto the light-sensitive paper, or by washing the print in various chemical solutions. Nowadays, I do the equivalent of all that and more in my computer, in the virtual workspace of "the digital darkroom."

Many people seem to believe photography is a completely literal and realistic medium -- as if the camera were a perfectly objective mechanical eye, a conclusive truth-recording machine.

But from its very beginning, photography has always been an interpretive art, and every photo is merely a representation of reality, not reality itself.

So many choices and limitations are inherent in the tools:

The optics, the filters, perspective adjustment, timing -- and countless other technical and compositional choices make the entire process of capturing, processing (or "developing"), and then printing the image intensely, hopelessly, subjective.

The more skilled the practitioner . . . the more he or she controls or doesn't control the camera, the saturation, the colors, the contrast, the composition, and so forth . . . the more personal it all is. Even photojournalism, where blatant retouching of the sort so common in advertising or fashion would be unethical, nonetheless has intensely subjective aspects inherent in the artistic choices so inescapable in the photographic process itself.

As Picasso said in a different context: "Art is a lie that tells the truth." And putting three-dimensional, moving, noisey, fragrant reality into a two-dimensional medium of shapes and colors is always an approximation, a recreation, an interpretation.